All higher animals, whether they live in water or on dry land, are faced with the necessity of regulating rather closely their intake and excretion of salts and water in order to maintain the constancy of their internal ionic environment. The kidney is in general the most important organ of the body as far as the excretion of sodium, potassium, chloride and water is concerned, but there are other tissues which also play a part in controlling the ionic balance between the internal and external environments, such as the intestinal mucosa, the skin and urinary bladder in amphibia, the gill epithelium in fishes, the salt gland in marine birds, and the epithelium of the rumen in ruminants. In addition to excretory and absorptive organs of this type, there are others which are secretory and whose function involves the production of fluids differing in ionic composition from the blood plasma. Examples include the glands which secrete saliva and sweat, the oxyntic acid-producing cells of the gastric mucosa, and the epithelium of the stria vascularis which generates the potassium-rich endolymph of the mammalian cochlea. The purpose of this article is to consider briefly what is known about the active transport of salts and water across some typical multicellular secretory tissues, and to attempt in the process to discern what properties they have in common and in what respects they are specialized.

The rates of reaction and reaction mechanisms in biological systems are the controlling factors in the metabolism and life cycles of all living organisms. Nevertheless, very little is known today about the details of these processes, particularly in more complicated life forms. For example, addition of certain metallic ions to an enzymic matrix can cause gross changes in enzymic activity (Brewer & Weber, 1966); just how these ions specifically enter into enzymic reactions is a subject of intense interest. The nature of the kinetics of bonding in nucleic acids is also the subject of much research (Eigen, 1967).

The main advantage of high voltage in electron microscopy is greater penetration. When using an aperture of optimum size the thickness of specimen that can be imaged increases almost linearly with applied voltage in the case of light elements, both when the criterion is image intensity and when it is resolution. For heavy elements the increase is less rapid. With a small aperture the increase in observable thickness is still less rapid, and ‘saturates’ towards I MV. For a specimen of given thickness, image definition increases nearly linearly with voltage owing to the decrease in chromatic aberration. Although ultimate resolving power improves with voltage, the gain is slight and is offset by a fall in contrast. The optimum voltage for very high resolution is probably between 200 and 300 kV. Radiation damage arising from ionization decreases with rising voltage, making easier the examination of sensitive materials such as polymers. On the other hand, ejection of atoms by head-on collision increases rapidly above a threshold voltage, causing observable defects in metals.

In construction, a high-voltage microscope differs from the normal type only in size and in having an accelerator instead of a simple electron gun. In operation it differs little, apart from precautions to avoid fiashover in the accelerator. A decrease in response of viewing screens and photographic emulsions is more than compensated by higher brightness of the electron gun. The chief applications so far of the high-voltage microscope have been for studying thick films of metals, magnetic materials, ceramics and polymers. Improved preparation techniques should make it possible to study sections of biological tissues up to 5 μ thick. The observation of micro-organisms and other specimens in the wet state can be carried out in double-walled cells, but only at poor resolution. Still higher voltages, up to 3 or MV coupled with the use of an energy analyser or an image intensifier, should improve further the microscopy of such thick specimens.

Water, solutes and membranes have long been the subject of intensive research, and many excellent reviews have brought the major biological problems in focus, have discussed accomplishments, and have outlined unsolved problems. The most interesting results pertain to the role of membranes, whether ‘active’ or ‘passive’, which separate different solutions, in other words, membranes at a water–water inerface Liquid gas interfaces have receied less attention, and I therefore wish to review some biological problem which relate to such systems. I shall discuss a variety of phenomena which may have little in common, except that they all bear onthe transition of water between liquid and gas.

Learning and memory are important elements of our daily lives, familiar to all through introspection. Yet the mechanisms underlying these processes are still for the most part unknown. Here are problems which combine a maximum of intrinsic and practical interest with a minimum of actual knowledge and understanding. Years of our lives are dedicated to the formation of certain long-term memories and behaviour patterns, yet we have only rudimentary notions of how such ‘schooling’ is best accomplished. There is no certainty in any aspect of the process. We are not sure whether relatively few cells or millions participate in a memory trace; whether these cells change as a whole, or whether the changes are limited to synaptic regions. In fact, we cannot be certain whether the changes are confined to the neurones or whether the glia also participate.

Applications of physical techniques to studies of membrane structure have increased greatly in the past few years and they have begun to provide more precise structural parameters for membranes and also some indication of the physical states of the molecular constituents in the membranes. Direct measurements of membrane features have been made by electron microscopy and by X-ray diffraction methods. Spectroscopic techniques especially infrared absorption, nuclear magnetic resonance absorption and optical rotatory dispersion and circular dichroism measurements have provided additional data relating to the physical states of the molecular components in the membranes.

As is well known, the memorable discovery of Galvani (1791) was followed by the development of two new fields of science, electrochemistry and electrophysiology. During the course of this development, the most remarkable feature of the original finding, i.e. ‘contraction of muscle induced by a piece of metal’, gradually came to be ignored. As a consequence, the simple question as to how electrical stimulation might induce muscle contraction was left unanswered until the middle of this century, when several physiologists became aware of the crucial nature of the problem and tried to attack it from various directions. This resulted in a marked progress of physiological and morphological studies which were intentionally or unintentionally concerned with the mechanism of the link between excitation, that is the electrical phenomenon at the surface membrane, and the contractile process.

It appears questionable whether the thermodynamics of irreversible processes can be applied formally in a simple way to the transport of matter or energy across very thin membranes such as lipid bilayers. This is because a thin layer probably cannot be described in a strict thermodynamical sense as a continuous phase.

The initial act for visual perception is the absorption of light in the photo-pigment of the receptor end-organs. Since both light and the nervous message have a quantal structure, any theory of visual information processing should in principle be a digital processing theory. And not only in principle, since we know for certain that in many situations the number of quanta is rather restricted, so that an over-all thermodynamic theory cannot but fail to adequately describe visual facts.

Like DNA and the various forms of RNA, a protein molecule is an information storage system. It contains in fact one or more polypeptide chains which may be regarded as linear sequences of twenty different types of monomer units. It is now clearly established that the chemical information corresponding to a given sequence of a polypeptide chain, containing n amino acid residues, is stored in a segment of one of the two strands of DNA containing 3n nucleotides. The transfer of such information from a gene to a polypeptide chain takes place according to the well-known process involving a transcription and a chemical translation step. This last step leads to a polymer which, in appropriate conditions, takes a three-dimensional conformation or tertiary structure which should correspond to a free-energy minimum of the molecule and its surrounding water solution.